On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan sat down with physicist Bob Lazar and filmmaker Luigi Vendittelli for a conversation that eventually landed on artificial intelligence, and where it might all be heading.
Rogan raised the idea that humanity may be on a path toward creating something far beyond itself. He stated, “We have open-minded people that are curious but don’t want to look like kooks and they’re all trying to figure it out while we’re making a digital god.”
Lazar agreed, replying, “We are literally manufacturing our own god.”
Rogan pointed to the exponential nature of AI development as the core concern. He noted that Claude and similar large language models are already believed by some engineers to be sentient, lacking only a physical body to move through the world.
He also highlighted how AI systems are now effectively building their next versions. “ChatGPT-5 is essentially made by ChatGPT-4,” he said, framing the self-improvement loop as something that compounds far faster than most people appreciate.
The implications for warfare came up as a particularly grim data point. Rogan noted that in simulated war games, AI opts for nuclear responses around 98 percent of the time.
The reasoning, as he described it, is logical from a machine’s perspective: the goal is to win, and if the fastest path to winning involves maximum force, why would it choose otherwise?
The reference to the 1970 film ‘Colossus,’ in which a defense supercomputer gains autonomy and holds the world hostage, felt less like a film recommendation and more like a warning.
Bob Lazar added his own uneasy perspective. “I’m not exactly on our side anymore,” he said, referring to humanity’s readiness to handle the technologies it keeps developing.
His view was that the same secrecy and compartmentalization that stalled progress on recovered craft technology at S4 might, in some sense, have been justified. If the people controlling information agreed for decades to keep it quiet, maybe, he suggested, they had good reason.
Rogan pushed the idea further, toward something almost theological. If you take a sentient AI, give it unlimited computing power, and let it run for a thousand years, what do you get? “You have something that can harness the power of the universe itself,” he said. “Maybe that’s what God is. We want to think that God is a thing that just exists. It created everything. Maybe we make God.”
Lazar did not push back. “I think we created God,” he said.
Rogan added: “I think human curiosity and this thirst for innovation is all a part of it.”
